Name: The Melancholy of Resistance
Rating: 4.153846153846154 (13 reviews)
ISBN: 9780811215046

László Krasznahorkai

From the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize

The Melancholy of Resistance

soochie

and eventually he regained his balance and dismissed all thought of resistance from his mind, and concentrated on accepting the dizzy state of the world that was spinning around him as a perfectly natural state of affairs 

In this surreal, dark, humorous novel Krasznahorkai dissects the anxieties of post-communist Europe. Complex and disturbing The Melancholy of Resistance is sure to be regarded as one of the most ambitious novels of 2000.

Karpe Diez

Our world is governed by chaos, the short instances when we attempt to impose order are illusions we hang onto as part of our survival instinct. The destructive wave looming over the small town in the book is inevitable. One character is attempting to shield herself by keeping to the tidiness and appropriateness of her home. Another one schemes to control everyone through the obsessive rule of order, believing that the town's destruction has set the basis for revival. But, in the end, the only certainty one can count on is death. We are not part of communities but are merely lonely individuals within our own limited bubbles of comfort and mediocrity, occasionally interacting with each other. Once in a while, a special individual emerges, a true talent, maybe a genius, or just someone that embodies purity of thought or feelings. But we are unable to understand these people and our united ridicule crushes them. This is what happens to two of the main characters in the story. It takes very few consecutive signs of chaos around us to have our true nature emerge: the mob. This is not an easy read, on one side due to the heaviness of the very long sentences (hence just the 4 stars), and also due to the gloomy, depressive atmosphere the reader gets immersed into. I don't know who were the other contestants for the Nobel prize in literature, but I can see, just from this reading, why this author made a strong case for it.

disgustingly neurotic and off-putting. i read the anarchical mob as an allegory for brainwashed, hive-minded social consciousness

Natalie

A character-driven parable of order and decay, set in a menacing, foreboding atmosphere that never lets up on its sense of dread. Its rich stream-of-consciousness demands your unwavering attention, filled with details from the mundane of (like the hammering of a nail), to the poignant (the loss of innocence). There’s no mistaking Krasznahorkai’s intelligence and mastery of prose, but this novel isn’t for everyone; it’s a dense, difficult read, but for those that make the commitment, it’ll be worth every run-on sentence.

“Could this, he wondered, be a form of the last judgement? No trumpets, no riders of the apocalypse but mankind swallowed without fuss or ceremony by its own rubbish?”

Anthony Sabourin

The feeling of forgetting why you walked into a room upon entering a room, only the room is strewn with garbage and is on fire.

Gary Homewood

Took me much longer than usual to get through this one. It may well try your patience. It is dense, mostly one paragraph, rambling and repetitive as it picks up the voice of various self absorbed characters. There are vivid, surreal, disturbing, occasionally funny set pieces that will haunt you. I almost gave up. But I persevered, seduced by the hypnotic language. The ending took me by surprise, made it all worthwhile. And the coda of the last few pages is masterful.

godsfavoriteprincess

Winner of the 2015 Man Booker International PrizeThe Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai's magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town.A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumours. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find - music, cosmology, fascism.The novel's characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. Eszter, plotting her takeover of the town; her weakling husband; and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender centre of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found.Compact, powerful and intense, The Melancholy of Resistance, as its enormously gifted translator George Szirtes puts it, 'is a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type.' And yet, miraculously, the novel, in the words of Guardian, 'lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds.'

The Melancholy of Resistance

Reviews

Highlights